Synopsis

A National Book Award FinalistOne of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the YearOne of the Best Books of the Year from The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle

In a rising Saudi Arabian city, far from weary, recession-scarred America, a struggling businessman named Alan Clay pursues a last-ditch attempt to stave off foreclosure, pay his daughter's college tuition, and finally do something great. In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together.

Excerpt

I.

Alan Clay woke up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It was May 30, 2010. He had spent two days on planes to get there.

In Nairobi he had met a woman. They sat next to each other while they waited for their flights. She was tall, curvy, with tiny gold earrings. She had ruddy skin and a lilting voice. Alan liked her more than many of the people in his life, people he saw every day. She said she lived in upstate New York. Not that far away from his home in suburban Boston.

If he had courage he would have found a way to spend more time with her. But instead he got on his flight and he flew to Riyadh and then to Jeddah. A man picked him up at the airport and drove him to the Hilton.

With a click, Alan entered his room at the Hilton at 1:12 a.m. He quickly prepared to go to bed. He needed to sleep. He had to travel an hour north at seven for an eight o’clock arrival at the King Abdullah Economic City. There he and his team would set up a holographic teleconference system and would wait to present it to King Abdullah himself. If Abdullah was impressed, he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant, and Alan’s commission, in the mid-six figures, would fix everything that ailed him.

So he needed to feel rested. To feel prepared. But instead he had spent four hours in bed not sleeping.

He thought of his daughter, Kit, who was in college, a very good and expensive college. He did not have the money to pay her tuition for the fall. He could not pay her tuition because he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it.

His decisions had been short sighted.

The decisions of his peers had been short sighted.

These decisions had been foolish and expedient.

But he hadn’t known at the time that his decisions were short sighted, foolish or expedient. He and his peers did not know they were making decisions that would leave them, leave Alan, as he now was — virtually broke, nearly unemployed, the proprietor of a one-man consulting firm run out of his home office.

He was divorced from Kit’s mother, Ruby. They had now been apart longer than they had been together. Ruby was an unholy pain in the ass who now lived in California and contributed nothing financially to Kit’s finances. College is your thing, she told him. Be a man about it, she said.

Now Kit would not be in college in the fall. Alan had put his house on the market but it had not yet sold. Otherwise he was out of options. He owed money to many people, including $18k to a pair of bicycle designers who had built him a prototype for a new bicycle he thought he could manufacture in the Boston area. For this he was called an idiot. He owed money to Jim Wong, who had loaned him $45k to pay for materials and the first and last on a warehouse lease. He owed another $65k or so to a half-dozen friends and would-be partners.

So he was broke. And when he realized he could not pay Kit’s tuition, it was too late to apply for any other aid. Too late to transfer.

Was it a tragedy that a healthy young woman like Kit would take a semester off of college? No, it was not a tragedy. The long, tortured history of the world would take no notice of a missed semester of college for a smart and capable young woman like Kit. She would survive. It was no tragedy. Nothing like tragedy.

They said it was a tragedy what had happened to Charlie Fallon. Charlie Fallon froze to death in the lake near Alan’s house. The lake next to Alan’s house.

Alan was thinking of Charlie Fallon while not sleeping in the room at the Jeddah Hilton. Alan had seen Charlie step into the lake that day. Alan was driving away, on his way to the quarry. It had not seemed normal that a man like Charlie Fallon would be stepping into the shimmering black lake in September, but neither was it extraordinary.

Charlie Fallon had been sending Alan pages from books. He had been doing this for two years. Charlie had discovered the Transcendentalists late in life and felt a kinship with them. He had seen that Brook Farm was not far from where he and Alan lived, and he thought it meant something. He traced his Boston ancestry, hoping to find a connection, but found none. Still, he sent Alan pages, with passages highlighted.

The workings of a privileged mind, Alan thought. Don’t send me more of that shit, he told Charlie. But Charlie grinned and sent more.

So when Alan saw Charlie stepping into the lake at noon on a Saturday he saw it as a logical extension of the man’s new passion for the land. He was only ankle-deep when Alan passed him that day.

II.

When Alan woke in the Jeddah Hilton he was already late. It was 8:15. He had fallen asleep just after five.

He was expected at the King Abdullah Economic City at eight. It was at least an hour away. After he showered and dressed and got a car to the site it would be ten. He would be two hours late on the first day of his assignment here. He was a fool. He was more a fool every year.

He tried Cayley’s cellphone. She answered, her husky voice. In another lifetime, a different spin of the wheel wherein he was younger and she older and both of them stupid enough to attempt it, he and Cayley would have been something terrible.

He explained. He did not lie. He could no longer muster the energy, the creativity required.

—Well, don’t worry, she said, with a small laugh — that voice of hers implied the possibility of, celebrated the existence of a fantastic life of abiding sensuality — we’re just setting up. But you’ll have to get your own ride. Any of you know how Alan will get a ride out here?

She seemed to be yelling to the rest of the team. The space sounded cavernous. He pictured a dark and hollow place, three young people holding candles, waiting for him and his lantern.

—Ah, Jakarta, Alan said. Then realized he had nothing to say about Jakarta. He knew nothing about Jakarta.

—Edward, what do you think of me renting a car through the hotel?

—Do you have an international driver’s license?

—No.

—Then no, I don’t think you should do this.

Alan called the concierge. He explained he needed a driver to take him to the King Abdullah Economic City.

—This will take a few minutes, the concierge said. His accent was not Saudi. There were apparently no Saudis working at this Saudi hotel. Alan had assumed as much. There were few Saudis working anywhere, he’d been told. They imported their labor in all sectors. We must find someone appropriate to drive you, the concierge said.

—You can’t just call a taxi?

—Not exactly, sir.

Alan’s blood went hot, but this was a mess of his making. He thanked the man and hung up. He knew you couldn’t just call a taxi in Jeddah or Riyadh — or so said the guidebooks, all of which were overwrought when it came to elucidating the dangers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to foreign travelers. The State Department had Saudi on the highest alert. Kidnapping was not unlikely. Alan might be sold to al-Qaeda, ransomed, transported across borders. But Alan had never felt in danger anywhere, and his assignments had taken him to Juarez in the nineties, Guatemala in the eighties.

* * *

The phone rang.

—We have a driver for you. When would you like him?

—As soon as possible.

—He’ll be here in twelve minutes.

Alan showered and shaved his mottled neck. He put on his undershirt, his white button-down, khakis, loafers, tan socks. Just dress like an American businessman, he’d been told. There were the cautionary tales of overzealous Westerners wearing thobes, headdresses. Trying to blend in, making an effort. This effort was not appreciated.

While fixing the collar of his shirt, Alan felt the lump on his neck that he’d first discovered a month earlier. It was the size of a golf ball, protruding from his spine, feeling like cartilage. Some days he figured it was part of his spine, because what else could it be?

It could be a tumor.

There on his spine, a lump like that — it had to be invasive and deadly. Lately he’d been cloudy of thought and clumsy of gait, and it made a perfect and terrible sense that there was something growing there, eating away at him, sapping him of vitality, squeezing away all acuity and purpose.

He’d planned to see someone about it, but then had not. A doctor could not operate on something like that. Alan didn’t want radiation, didn’t want to go bald. No, the trick was to touch it occasionally, track attendant symptoms, touch it some more, then do nothing.

In twelve minutes Alan was ready.

He called Cayley.

—I’m leaving the hotel now.

—Good. We’ll be all set up by the time you get here.

The team could get there without him, the team could set up without him. And so why was he there at all? The reasons were specious but had gotten him here. The first was that he was older than the other members of the team, all of them children, really, none beyond thirty. Second, Alan had once known King Abdullah’s nephew when they had been part of a plastics venture in the mid-nineties, and Eric Ingvall, the Reliant VP in New York, felt that this was a good enough connection that it would get the attention of the King. Probably not true, but Alan had chosen not to change their minds.

Alan was happy for the work. He needed the work. The eighteen months or so before the call from Ingvall had been humbling. Filing a tax return for $22,350 in taxable income was an experience he hadn’t expected to have at his age. He’d been home consulting for seven years, each year with dwindling revenue. No one was spending. Even five years ago business had been good; old friends threw him work, and he was useful to them. He’d connect them with vendors he knew, pull favors, cut deals, cut fat. He’d felt worthwhile.

Now he was fifty-four years old and was as intriguing to corporate America as an airplane built from mud. He could not find work, could not sign clients. He had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Alan Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07. The game when they hit four consecutive home runs against the Yankees. April 22, 2007. He’d watched those four and a half minutes a hundred times and each viewing brought him something like joy. A sense of rightness, of order. It was a victory that could never be taken away.

Alan called the concierge.

—Is the car there?

—I’m sorry, he will be late.

—Is this the guy from Jakarta?

—It is.

—Edward.

—Yes.

—Hi again, Edward. How late will the car be?

—Twenty more minutes. Can I send some food up to you?

Alan went to the window and looked out. The Red Sea was calm, unremarkable from this height. A six-lane highway ran just alongside it. A trio of men in white fished at the pier.

Alan looked at the balcony next to his. He could see his reflection in the glass. He looked like an average man. When shaved and dressed, he passed for legitimate. But something had darkened under his brow. His eyes had retreated and people were noticing. At his last high school reunion, a man, a former football player whom Alan had despised, said, Alan Clay, you’ve got a thousand-mile stare. What happened to you?

A gust of wind came from the sea. In the distance, a container ship moved across the water. Here and there a few other boats, tiny as toys.

There had been a man next to him on the flight from Boston to London. He was drinking gin and tonics and monologuing.

—It was good for a while, right? he’d said. What was it, thirty years or so? Maybe twenty, twenty-two? But it was over, without a doubt it was, and now we had to be ready to join western Europe in an era of tourism and shopkeeping. Wasn’t that the gist of what that man on the plane had said? Something like that.

He wouldn’t shut up, and the drinks kept coming.

—We’ve become a nation of indoor cats, he’d said. A nation of doubters, worriers, overthinkers. Thank God these weren’t the kind of Americans who settled this country. They were a different breed! They crossed the country in wagons with wooden wheels! People croaked along the way, and they barely stopped. Back then, you buried your dead and kept moving.

The man, who was drunk and maybe unhinged, too, was, like Alan, born into manufacturing and somewhere later got lost in worlds tangential to the making of things. He was soaking himself in gin and tonics and was finished with it all. He was on his way to France, to retire near Nice, in a small house his father had built after WWII. That was that.

Alan had humored the man, and they had compared some thoughts about China, Korea, about making clothes in Vietnam, the rise and fall of the garment industry in Haiti, the price of a good room in Hyderabad. Alan had spent a few decades with bikes, then bounced around between a dozen or so other stints, consulting, helping companies compete through ruthless efficiency, robots, lean manufacturing, that kind of thing. And yet year by year, there was less work for a guy like him. People were done manufacturing on American soil. How could he or anyone argue for spending five to ten times what it cost in Asia? And when Asian wages rose to untenable levels — $5 an hour, say — there was Africa. The Chinese were already making sneakers in Nigeria. Jack Welch said manufacturing should be on a perpetual barge, circling the globe for the cheapest conditions possible, and it seemed the world had taken him at his word. The man on the plane wailed in protest: It should matter where something was made!

About Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers lives in Northern California with his family.

Praise|Awards

Praise

“A Hologram for the King is an outstanding achievement in Eggers’s already impressive career, and an essential read.” —San Francisco Chronicle“[A] clear, supremely readable parable of America in the global economy that is haunting, beautifully shaped, and sad. . . . A story human enough to draw blood…. Groundbreaking.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Completely engrossing. . . . Perfect.” —Fortune

"Dave Eggers is a prince among men. . . . A strike against the current state of global economic injustice." —Vanity Fair “A fascinating novel.” —The New Yorker “Eerie, suspenseful and tightly controlled.” —The Globe and Mail

“A comic but deeply affecting tale about one man's travails that also provides a bright, digital snapshot of our times.” —The New York Times “Eggers’s most fully-realized character to date. . . . True genius.” —Boston Globe “An unforgettable read.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A novel poised on the central meridian of our times. . . . Eggers maintains an exquisite balance of irony, empathy, dark humor, and unexpected tenderness in this taut exploration of the ever-increasing price of ordinary survival. A book as heartbreaking as the global economy it explores with such beauty and ferocity.” —National Book Awards citation

“Eggers, continuing the worldly outlook that informed his recent books Zeitoun and What Is the What, spins this spare story—a globalized Death of a Salesman—into a tightly controlled parable of America’s international standing and a riff on middle-class decline that approaches Beckett in its absurdist despair.” —The New York Times citation for Best Books of the Year

“Solidly constructed and elegantly told. There is nothing inaccessible about it. . . . Clay may not be like each of us, but he is an everyman whose irrelevancy is parallel to America’s own.” —Los Angeles Times

“Eggers understands the pressures of American downward-mobility, and in the protagonist of his novel, Alan Clay, has created an Everyman, a post-modern Willy Loman. . . . The novel operates on a grand and global scale, but it also is intimate.” —The Chicago Tribune

“Fascinating. . . . A Hologram for the King, as far from home as it might seem, is an acute slice of American life.” —Tampa Bay Times

“A fresh surprise. . . . Strong and satisfying. As the kingless days pass, Alan ventures from the tent and hotel into the rich, unsettling realities of the Kingdom, and Eggers ventures deeper into Alan, as well as into the question that has seemingly guided Eggers’ work for years: What does it mean to be an American in a world that has places like the Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or post-Katrina New Orleans?” —San Francisco Weekly

“Deft and darkly comic . . . A Hologram for the King is not only a portrait of a man in midlife trying desperately to salvage his future. The book is emblematic of what Eggers sees as wrong in America today: the collapse of homegrown industry, the outsourcing of labor, a loss of confidence, soured ideals. . . . But [it] isn’t a bummer—or if it is, it’s a bummer beautifully enlivened by oddball encounters and oddball characters, by stranger-in-a-strange-land episodes. . . . A Hologram for the King moves forward—a momentum of melancholy and possibility, driven by the meditations and memories of its once-noble American salesman hero.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Eggers’s spare prose is a pleasure, and A Hologram for the King proves to be a deft blend of surreal adventure, absurd comedy and pointed observations.” —San Jose Mercury News

“[Hologram] has at its center a sort of moral vision quest. . . . Alan’s plight is endearing in its universality, even while being singularly his.” —Time Out Chicago

“A Hologram for the King presents us with the Great American Novel for this not-so-great America. . . . It strikes a new note for Eggers with its pervading sense of gallows humor.” —Baltimore City Paper

“A Hologram for the King . . . reads fast and clear, with clean, stripped-down prose and a tone at once mournful and darkly amused. . . . It’s not that this world is changing, or that it will change. The world already changed, and now everyone, whether they like it or not, is tasked with figuring out how—or if—they can adapt.” —Portland Mercury

“A Beckettian masterpiece. . . . The finest work to date from an influential figure in American letters.” –The Telegraph (UK)

Awards

About the Book

The questions, topics, and other material that follow are intended to enhance your group’s conversation about A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers' wry and moving novel about the human costs of our new information economy.

About the Guide

Alan Clay is a self-employed consultant whose personal life is a mess and whose financial situation is even worse. He has just arrived in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where in KAEC, King Abdullah Economic City, he awaits a meeting with the king himself. Alan plans to make a presentation to the King of a holographic teleconference system. If all goes well, the company he is consulting for will be awarded the IT contract for the entire new city, and in turn Alan will be flush and successful for the first time in years. He will even be able to pay his daughter’s college tuition so she won’t have to drop out.

But the city isn’t built yet, and Alan and his team have been ordered to set up in a white plastic tent on the beach with no wireless signal and no air-conditioning. Days and weeks pass, and the king does not arrive. Yet Alan hangs on because he has no choice: his survival depends on this deal. While he waits, he becomes friendly with his driver Yousef, a Saudi with personal trouble of his own; with Hanne, a young Danish expat who generously shares her siddiqi, the forbidden alcohol of choice in the Kingdom; and Dr. Zahra Hakem, a woman so intelligent, attractive and kind that she threatens to reawaken Alan’s moribund emotional life.

In A Hologram for the King, Dave Eggers creates a besieged and bewildered anti-hero whose life has fallen apart because he has failed to adapt quickly enough to America’s new economic reality. He has clung too long to the old model, in which creativity and innovation were useful in creating American-made items, like cars and bicycles. Eggers takes us around the world to show how one man fights to hold himself and his splintering family together in the face of the global economy’s gale-force winds.

About the Author

Dave Eggers is the bestselling author of Zeitoun, winner of the American Book Award and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His novel What Is the What was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won France’s Prix Medici.

Discussion Guides

1. In the first few pages, we learn many things about Alan Clay: he lacks the courage to spend more time with a woman he is attracted to; he lacks the money to pay his daughter’s college tuition; he is divorced; his house is on the market but has not yet sold; he owes money to many people. We are told, “he had made a series of foolish decisions in his life. He had not planned well. He had not had courage when he needed it” (4). Do you feel distant from Alan, or do you feel empathy for him? Does your response to him change as the novel proceeds? Can you think of similar protagonists in other novels you have read?

2. The story of Charlie Fallon’s suicide comes up in the first chapter (5-6), and then intermittently throughout the novel (59-60, 128, 183-84). What does Charlie’s suicide mean to Alan, and why does he keep thinking about it?

3. Alan “had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Adam Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07” (11). What has caused the decline of Alan’s career? Is there any way he might have averted the situation in which he now finds himself?

4. Alan sits next to a drunken man on the plane to Saudi Arabia who argues that the United States is a nation in decline: “We’ve become a nation of indoor cats,” he says. He attributes the decline partly to the fact that “People were done manufacturing on American soil” (13). Is Alan’s life exemplary of this crisis in American identity?

5. While Alan’s whole life depends on selling an IT system to King Abdullah for the new Economic City, Alan’s driver Yousef believes the city will never be built. But the friendship between Yousef and Alan continues nonetheless. How are Alan’s jokes important to the friendship? What is appealing about Yousef? What does he distrust about Alan?

6. How is digital technology—which Alan is now trying to sell to King Abdullah—different from the creation and export of manufactured things? How do the young people Alan is working with on the hologram presentation differ from him in their assumptions about work and business?

7. There is interesting tension between Alan’s former life, in which he was involved in the production of real goods (bicycles) and his situation during the course of Hologram¸ where he is, essentially, selling NOTHING — a mirage, a dream, an image. Is this a commentary on America’s role in the global marketplace?

8. Hanne gives Alan some contraband alcohol, which he enjoys alone in his hotel room. How do Alan’s alcohol-fueled reflections affect the mood of the novel? Why is Alan surprised by what he sees at the embassy party Hanne takes him to (141-46)?

9. Is it surprising that Alan doesn’t encourage Hanne’s attempts to seduce him? Why does he think that without sex, “life was altogether more streamlined now” (177)? How does he respond to the physical presence of his doctor, Zahra Hakem (153)?

10. To what degree are Alan’s difficulties in the present related to his marriage to his ex-wife, Ruby (Chapters xvi, xxi, xxiii, xxix)? How has his failed marriage affected his relationship with his daughter?

11. Intermittently, Alan is mentally writing a letter to his daughter, Kit. One of the statements that comes to him is, “The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That’s the best you can do” (102-03). Discuss the value or limitation of this statement as a maxim for life.

12. Yousef takes Alan along to his father’s house in the desert. Impressed that Yousef’s father saved the money from selling shoes to build the enormous house, Alan reflects on a wall he built back at home (235-38). What does the story of Alan’s wall reveal about bureaucratic barriers to action, independence and productivity?

13. What does Alan learn about the realities of life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia through his conversations with Hasan, Yousef, and Yousef’s friends? Are their ambitions for the future as restricted as his own? Based on these relationships, do you think the novel could have been set in another country and successfully addressed the same themes and issues—i.e., is Eggers more interested in exploring the culture of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East or Alan Clay?

14. “It will be good to be the one to see and shoot the wolf,” Alan thinks (260). How does Alan manage to nearly kill the shepherd boy, and what does he learn about himself in that moment (261-62)?

15. What function does Alan’s mental letter to his daughter serve in his own mind? What is he trying to communicate to her? Does their trip to see the launch of the space shuttle Atlantis show him to be a good father (270-76)?

16. When the benign cyst is removed from Alan’s neck, he feels confused: “If there was no tumor attached to his spine, dragging him to these recent depths, then what was the explanation?” (277). Does the fact that there is nothing physically wrong with him imply that he will now feel better psychologically?

17. Alan tells Zahra a story about a camping trip with his father (304-07). What is the meaning of the story, and how does Zahra react? Does Alan’s romantic visit with Zahra seem to imply a happier time ahead for him, or not?

18. Alan finally does make his presentation to King Abdullah. How does the ending work and what response does it create in you?

19. Eggers has chosen for the epigraph—“It is not every day that we are needed”—a quote from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The character Vladimir says, “Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not.” Is Alan an American everyman? Why might Eggers have chosen this passage for the epigraph? What does Alan’s plight suggest about the last few decades of American history, and also about Alan himself as a man experiencing what one might call an existential crisis?